


Friendly Regards

by TheWillowBends



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e26 Once Upon a Time (Lucifer TV), F/M, Fluff, Fuckruary 2021 (Lucifer TV), Fuckruary 2021: Alternate Universe, Fuckruary 2021: Friends With Benefits, Fuckruary 2021: Love is Love, Idiots in Love, Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29515845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWillowBends/pseuds/TheWillowBends
Summary: He's probably on the receiving end of some kind of cosmic joke, but Lucifer is finding it hard to mind as much as he should.
Relationships: Chloe Decker & Lucifer Morningstar, Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 31
Kudos: 166





	Friendly Regards

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MintChocoPie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintChocoPie/gifts).



> Set in the 3x26 Alternate Universe "Once Upon a Time."
> 
> Edit #2 on 2/18/21 - Changed the rating of this story from M to T after rereading back through it and realizing that I’d cut out some of the more graphic content for flow purposes. You’re not crazy; it just better reflects the content now.

Chloe Decker doesn’t call it a booty call the first time she shows up at his penthouse raring to go, still months later than he expected it to happen. She plays it off as a fancy, a whim, something to do on a Friday when she’s bored and pining for excitement that isn’t part of the sanitized glamour of her Hollywood bubble, something rough around the edges that speaks to the mischief in her heart. Hers may be closed to him, but Lucifer knows the face of desire, the art of its shape and contours, can feel it in the sway of her body on the dancefloor, pressed close to his, in the sound of her laughter and the brightness of her eyes. It’s a game women play, one where they have few betters, and Lucifer loves it the way he loves long legs, fast cars, and dark secrets.

The jig is up by the time the clock strikes eleven. She lets him devour her on the way up, all hard kisses and roaming hands, her body trembling with laughter and desire both. By the time they stumble into the penthouse, she’s practically begging for it, grabbing one of his hands to place it where she wants him most, her smile bold when she asks him if he can feel what he does to her. Under her dress, she’s bare, all soft and slick, and he laughs as he kisses her wetly as she tugs open his buttons, one by one, like picking open the lock to the worst kept treasure, one that’s been plenty well plundered.

She’s desperate, and of course she is, he thinks. She would be after all this unnecessary deprivation, the way she constantly toed the line and pulled back, always touching the edges of his borders, afraid to cross them in her father’s line of sight. Really, he gets it, hardly even minds it. Chloe won’t be the first woman to tuck him away in the shadowy places, her dirty little secret. If anything, it only makes the sex better.

He eats her out on the bar, enjoying the way her thighs tremble against his shoulders, and then they fuck on the couch twice, once with her on the top, then on her knees, the way she professes she likes it best with a blush he kisses the shame right out of since he has none. She’s a livid, writhing, exuberant creature in his arms, a wild thing he’s happy to help let out of the cage to live a little, walking through all the dark places she would be too afraid to visit alone.

Afterward, Chloe cuddles into his side, laughing a little at her own ridiculousness, the superstitious way she kept waiting for a sign Lucifer knew they didn’t need. He humors her, regardless, thankful she puts her faith in things better than his father. Devil knows she would never have come to him if she was waiting for that. They talk late into the night and into two more rounds that finally make it to the bed, slower and sweeter than the frantic pace of earlier, and when she drifts off, he makes sure it is with a smile.

In the morning, he makes her eggs and pancakes, insisting she needs the strength after last night. It gives him a little thrill to watch her roll her eyes at him, softened with the endearing curve of a self-conscious smile, so pert and full-lipped he can’t help but kiss her again, even in her something seems shy and uncertain now that the night is over. Something about the moment seems more precious for it, a reward earned rather than stolen. After, when she is dressed and ready to leave, he watches her go with a wistful smile, having an inkling of what’s to come, knowing people love the dark best when they can keep it at bay.

Lucifer isn’t surprised when she doesn’t call or text the next day or the day after or even into the third week when the unread line on his phone starts being less of a nuisance and more a subject of pity. He does resent in himself the notion of longing, the niggling hope he hadn’t even known had burgeoned under the thrill of the chase and the many months working their case that she was something a little different, something he wouldn’t have to go to Vegas to find. He cancels his appointments with the good doctor she introduced him to, puts on a smile that shines even when it wears brittle, and fucks his way through an entire ballet company and half its orchestra to get himself back in the groove.

When the flower arrangement arrives for him in the middle of the week, they both baffle and amuse, until he opens the letter that accompanies it to find Miss Decker’s messy cursive looping around the swirls and angles of his name. Included in it is a letter of apologia for falling off the radar following her father’s heart attack. Lucifer stares at the text dumbly, feeling the part of the jester having jingled miserably across the court to find himself the subject of the joke for all the wrong reasons. His phone rings two minutes later, and he picks it up and answers promptly.

He meets her at a tiny diner, the one she took him to after their day on the witness stand for Stryder’s murder case, revealing later it had been one of late stuntman’s favorites in the late hours after shooting. To his surprise, her eyes are dry and smile clean and pretty. When she reaches out for his hand, he lets her take it, even against his better instincts. He imagines she needs the comfort of it. Death has that way for mortals.

“Thank you for coming. I’m sorry for going off the radar for so long, but as you can imagine, it’s been a lot with my father just getting discharged last week. Mom’s been a total head case.” She rubs a thumb over his, then asks, “Did you like the flowers?”

“They were lovely, but you should know I’m not the sort that requires being wined and dined to get into bed,” he answers, and she laughs, a sound that makes his belly lurch in pleasure, a refrain from music he hadn’t known he missed.

“Oh, I am _well_ aware of that. I just wanted to do something nice for you since I imagine the radio silence was a little upsetting.”

He sniffs, shrugging his shoulders. “The devil’s in the details, darling, but typically not the petty ones. I entertain myself plenty just fine.”

“I know,” she says with a smile. “I’m glad to see you. I missed having a friend around.”

“A friend,” he echoes, feeling the way the word sits on his tongue, slippery like a fish.

“Yes. I should have called you sooner, but I wasn’t sure you were in the mood to deal with _two_ distraught and harried Decker women, especially since, you know.” She smiles wryly. “You’re not big on fathers.”

“I understand,” he says, even though he does not and is relieved that she didn’t. He puts on a smile for her sake. “The devil is rarely the face a sick man wants to come around to, as it is.”

“Oh stop it,” she says with a laugh, but her hand tightens around his, and something in him loosens, a knot he didn’t know was tightened.

They order coffee and talk about when her next movie starts filming and the online classes she’s been quietly but diligently working her way through. Banal little details, the kind that bore him, but he hangs on each word pitifully, like a starving man reaching out with an empty cup. When she asks him to drive her home, saying she caught a ride, he doesn’t question it.

Halfway home, she turns to him with a smile, sweeter and softer than anything she’s given him before, and says again, “I really missed you.”

“Who wouldn’t?” he quips, keeping his eyes to the road and not on the hand that creeps over the armrest to settle on his thigh, warming it.

She laughs a little and gives him a squeeze, and while he was out of his depth in other ways, in this, he had no equal. He revs the gas loudly, the car jolting forward hard enough that she glances his way through shrewdly narrowed eyes.

He’s only been to her place once or twice, a neatly ornate home that approaches nothing of the opulence of his own properties, but it has an open floor plan and modern kitchen with marble counters just the right height to bend her over. Like the last time, the first round is frantic, and they only undress enough to get the job done, and she gasps and moans and pushes back into him like the wild thing he’s learned she is, the one she needs his help so badly to let out. He doesn’t know much about being a friend, but the devil can certainly give her this.

After, he strips her down silently, letting her return the favor and then some when she drops to her knees. A little while later they get into it again on the couch, her legs thrown over his shoulders, letting her unravel under him, all the ways she’s bound up by stress and grief and the pain of being human. It makes him think of a garden once lush and verdant, full of fruits ripe for the taking, and what a mistake it may have been to partake of it at all. When she comes, he makes certain she sees stars.

In the morning, he awakens to eggs and pancakes, and she smiles at him over a cup of coffee flavored with those synthetic sweeteners he keeps telling her are the source of real evil in the world. Around noon, he makes noise about leaving, feeling the discomfort of her domestications like an ill-fitting suit, and she lets him go but not without a kiss and a promise to call later.

They fall into a strange rhythm, like a pendulum that lurches unsteadily at the height of its displacement on the downswing. Phone calls and flirty text messages, coffee and dinner at the little diner she insists on despite the awful decor, navigating the sinister corridors of daddy issues between them as her father returns to work and his position of displease on his presence in her life, and, of course, sex, at her place or his, in every position imaginable and then some, fast and furious, slow and satisfying, dirty and sweet. 

The devil’s never been one for exclusivity, and he tells her this, and there is something distressing in the way she shrugs this off and accepts it, something that lurches in him that has all the poison taste of hope. Even as he tries to stamp it out, it sneaks up on him; he barely notices when his voicemails start piling up, when the elevator pings a little less, and entire weekends pass at Lux without his presence.

Maze warns him that he’s changing, and as hateful as that sentiment rings, it’s true that Chloe Decker eases herself in, slippery as an eel and twice as resilient. Linda tells him intimacy is normal and represents growth, and he laughs at her for it, asking her if she would prefer trying out a different type of currency to test that theory. The good doctor just purses her lips, tapping a pen against her clipboard rhythmically, some slight humor in her eyes Lucifer doesn’t trust, like a joke he isn’t in on but should be. 

But Chloe calls them _friends_ , and the word warms him more than he likes to admit. The months pass, and she stays, long after he expected otherwise. He thought she would have her taste of shadows, but she keeps circling around again, a gilded noose from which he can’t help but hang having tied the knot himself.

One day, he finds himself sifting through paperwork with her, a report she’s working on for a class. He catches an eyeful of her, wearing nothing but his shirt, her hair sex-teased and mouth swollen with kisses, all compliments of his efforts, the kind nobody offers better.

“You know,” he says dryly, tipping a pile of badly xeroxed legal documents into a box next to him, “typically when people call me for a booty call, they aren’t expecting me to do _homework_ after. Honestly, you could be riding me halfway to the moon by now.”

“We’ve already done it twice and once in the car on the way here, and this paper is due by the weekend,” she chides. She pouts a little with a full lip he wants to bite. “Besides, I think we’re past booty calls at this point.”

He scoffs. “Well, this certainly isn’t high tea.”

Chloe pauses, looking at him thoughtfully. “What exactly would you call it then?”

Gesturing around him with a bemused smile, he says, “ _Fun._ The kind the devil knows best.”

“Fun,” she repeats, thinking that over. “You mean...the kind between friends?” She raises an eyebrow. “You think we’re friends with benefits?”

“Well, we certainly aren’t ships passing in the night, unless we’re counting regular trade routes.”

“We took my mother out for dinner last week. You even asked how my father was doing.”

“I understand humans call that polite conversation.”

Her mouth twitches. “Right. Humans.” Marking off something on a sheet of paper, she adds, “I guess we can call it that if it makes you more comfortable.”

He frowned at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I can wait,” she says warmly.

“For _what_?”

Putting down her clipboard, she sighs and looks at him over her glasses, the nerdy ones she’s taken to wearing around him in the last month or so in their off hours that he likes so much for reasons he can’t quite articulate. Hot for teacher, maybe. _Hot Tub_ throwback nostalgia. He likes it even more when her gaze narrows at the smirk on his face.

“Sometimes I wonder if Linda is overpaid,” she says slowly, “and then I remember she has to deal with you.”

“She gets the _pleasure_ of dealing with me.”

“Sure she does.” Leaning over, she kisses the corner of his mouth but pulls back before he can deepen it. “And so do I, I suppose.”

Getting off the floor, she gets up, then stretches, letting him get a good look at those mile-long legs that walked out of a hot tub and right into the heart of his favorite fantasies. His desires are myriad, endless, like staring down the well so deep the light fades long before the bottom is reached. If she knew the half of them, all the little plans the beast makes for her in the dark, she wouldn’t be so glib.

She walks to the kitchen, feet padding softly against the floor. The whisper they make against the floorboards calls to him. Hunger twists in his belly, a thread that longs to be unspooled.

“Let’s take a break,” she says, leaning a hip against a counter as she takes a long drink from a water bottle.

Lucifer watches her throat work as she does, letting it work something in him. “Why ever?” he asks, running his tongue along his teeth. “In the mood to be ‘friendly,’ darling?”

When she nods, he gets to his feet hurriedly, graceless in a way that makes her grin at him. She won’t be so smug in a few minutes; he’s got better plans for that mouth. It’s already gone when he sweeps her up in his arms, her laughter ringing in his ears as he carries her up the stairs over one shoulder.

One of these days, they will have to speak in a language they can both understand, but for now, he can give her this.


End file.
